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BBC News - Railway Modelling


Darius43
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I saw that too. It seemed quite odd to see it. I'm so used to articles being aloof about railway modelling that one that isn't and feels more complimentary caught me out... :lol:

Edited by Ian J.
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Thanks for that Darius. A nice positive piece and the video is excellent, but why oh why is the need for sub-titles on so much these days. Can we not understand our own language by just listening carefully? Rant over!

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I thought it was a good serious piece and I liked the way that the time taken over the small details was presented as a positive thing rather than being strangely obsessive. It seems surprising when the hobby is shown by the wider media in a positive light, but perhaps this shouldn't be so. Looking at the number of magazines on the newsagents shelf shows that railway modelling isn't a niche hobby.

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1 hour ago, Re6/6 said:

Thanks for that Darius. A nice positive piece and the video is excellent, but why oh why is the need for sub-titles on so much these days. Can we not understand our own language by just listening carefully? Rant over!

 

Sounded foreign to me, glad of the sub titles!

Nice to see the use of a professional actor, presumably his 40th step?

 

Mike.

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1 hour ago, Re6/6 said:

Thanks for that Darius. A nice positive piece and the video is excellent, but why oh why is the need for sub-titles on so much these days. Can we not understand our own language by just listening carefully? Rant over!

For those who are hard of hearing???????

 

Gordon A

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Agree with comments above and I love the interactive feature where you can drag between the real image and the model.  One perhaps for someone with the picture skills of Andy Y to try in the online version of BRM on a Peterborough North or Little Bytham?

 

David

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3 hours ago, Re6/6 said:

Thanks for that Darius. A nice positive piece and the video is excellent, but why oh why is the need for sub-titles on so much these days. Can we not understand our own language by just listening carefully? Rant over!

 

Possibly because of the way most people look at the internet. Most now look at it on their phones or tablets in places where having volume is frowned upon or they are listening to music as well.

 

People sitting at home looking at the internet on a proper computer are very much the minority now.

 

 

Jason

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2 hours ago, Gordon A said:

For those who are hard of hearing???????

 

Gordon A

Yes, I am one of them.............my recommended deaf aids cost over $7000.00, just a bit beyond me so subbies really help me enjoy things.

 

Mike

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6 hours ago, Re6/6 said:

Thanks for that Darius. A nice positive piece and the video is excellent, but why oh why is the need for sub-titles on so much these days. Can we not understand our own language by just listening carefully? Rant over!

 

In addition to those not lucky enough to be able to listen carefully, the BBC News website is viewed by a global audience, so for many, English will not be their first language, and a fairly heavily accented English will be quite hard to understand. A lot of my English speaking overseas friends often find the written word a lot easier to take-in.

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I was very pleasantly surprised by this.

 

I'm not sure I've seen an article like this in the mainstream media before - just done totally straight as a description of something interesting and worthwhile that some people do - no attempt to belittle anyone, or even use any one of the rail-related puns that must be taught in a module in journalist school.

 

The only thing that stood out as a little "off" was the "Even the trains are in keeping with the era." line mentioned above.

 

On the other hand, if it wasn't for that, I'd be wondering if the article had been written by one of the modellers themselves rather than a journalist as a piece of low-effort journalism.

 

(I had that experience for a professional society  magazine once - yes we'd like to publish something on what you're doing - please write an article about it in the third person as if we had written it....)

 

Come to think of, there was no attempt to link it in to the Great Model Railway Challenge, but then again perhaps they wouldn't given that it's on a rival channel.

 

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19 minutes ago, Coryton said:

On the other hand, if it wasn't for that, I'd be wondering if the article had been written by one of the modellers themselves rather than a journalist as a piece of low-effort journalism.

 

(I had that experience for a professional society  magazine once - yes we'd like to publish something on what you're doing - please write an article about it in the third person as if we had written it....)

 

As opposed to "research our topic from scratch and then let us moan you didn't get it right." Sadly, journalism has to be done on the cheap nowadays because people refuse to pay for it. The days of magazines or even newspapers having rooms full of people who can get away with knocking out a fully researched single page a week vanished decades ago. Now the advice is very sensibly to write so the text can easily be plonked on the page. It might be edited, but at least there is a starting point. Not ideal, but pay peanuts, get monkeys, and readers won't even pay peanuts nowadays.

 

22 minutes ago, Coryton said:

Come to think of, there was no attempt to link it in to the Great Model Railway Challenge, but then again perhaps they wouldn't given that it's on a rival channel.

 

From the article: 'Alloa' won't be there this year, but more than 50 layouts will be on display, including one from Aberdeen Model Rail Club which won The Great Model Railway Challenge on Channel 5 last year.

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10 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

As opposed to "research our topic from scratch and then let us moan you didn't get it right." Sadly, journalism has to be done on the cheap nowadays because people refuse to pay for it. The days of magazines or even newspapers having rooms full of people who can get away with knocking out a fully researched single page a week vanished decades ago. Now the advice is very sensibly to write so the text can easily be plonked on the page. It might be edited, but at least there is a starting point. Not ideal, but pay peanuts, get monkeys, and readers won't even pay peanuts nowadays.

 

I understand that but  what I personally don't like is the appearance that the article has been written by the journalist when it hasn't. I don't see what would be wrong with saying something like "Such-and-such tells us about the layout they built" and making it clear who wrote it.

 

And the occasion I was referring to wasn't "nowadays" - it was when most people had never heard of the internet and the idea of getting your news on-line was a long way away.

 

11 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

From the article: 'Alloa' won't be there this year, but more than 50 layouts will be on display, including one from Aberdeen Model Rail Club which won The Great Model Railway Challenge on Channel 5 last year.

 

I stand corrected on that then.

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36 minutes ago, Coryton said:

I understand that but  what I personally don't like is the appearance that the article has been written by the journalist when it hasn't. I don't see what would be wrong with saying something like "Such-and-such tells us about the layout they built" and making it clear who wrote it.

Journalists can't be railway modellers? 

 

As to "Even the trains are in keeping with the era"; remembering that the article isn't written exclusively for those in the know, I'd take that remark as an acknowledgment of the achievement of also having modelled the trains correctly.

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4 minutes ago, OhOh said:

Journalists can't be railway modellers? 

 

As to "Even the trains are in keeping with the era"; remembering that the article isn't written exclusively for those in the know, I'd take that remark as an acknowledgment of the achievement of also having modelled the trains correctly.

 

Of course they can but I'm not sure how you got that from what I said.

 

Perhaps I could have put it more clearly - I wasn't intending to refer to this article in particular but the general idea of copy being provided to papers or magazines as if  written by their staff when it wasn't. 

 

As for the "even the trains" line, it just seemed a bit odd - as if getting the trains right was some kind of added bonus.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, OhOh said:

Journalists can't be railway modellers? 

 

As to "Even the trains are in keeping with the era"; remembering that the article isn't written exclusively for those in the know, I'd take that remark as an acknowledgment of the achievement of also having modelled the trains correctly.

 

And a lot of people happily mix up trains from different eras or even parts of the World. Witness Jon Snow's layout, which features on the TV from time to time.  The idea that you lock down your rolling stock to a very specific era might not have occured to some people, and so needs explicitly stating. 

 

I thought the BBC piece was really good. 

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15 minutes ago, OhOh said:

As to "Even the trains are in keeping with the era"; remembering that the article isn't written exclusively for those in the know, I'd take that remark as an acknowledgment of the achievement of also having modelled the trains correctly.

 

Sorry, I flagged that up because it tickled me. I wrote a sentence, which I then deleted before posting, along the lines of the priorities of non-model-railway-enthusiast viewers being different to those of enthusiasts: they're probably more impressed by the washing on the line than by knowing that every locomotive was based in Fife at the period modelled. That is a tribute to the overall quality of the modelling and attention to detail on Alloa, not a criticism of either "them" or "us". 

 

Some journalistic effort must have gone into the piece, even if the Alloa team are allowed to speak for themselves - someone had to make the choice that this is newsworthy and go to the effort of setting the piece up. At the very least, a professional film crew must have visited the layout? And how much more superficial these days is the coverage of a typical political event?

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I thought the article was very positive and another opportunity for this great hobby to be showcased to a wider audience, regardless of who wrote it! If it was the journalist who may or may not have any experience of railway modelling, then excellent work. If it was the club member(s), then even better considering writing news articles may not be their main skill set! 

 

Well done SRSG and the BBC! 

 

Ian

 

 

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